


Crazy Quilt

by deliverusfromsburb



Series: Tuesjade Prompts [11]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: (references to both in the past), Body Horror, Gen, Mind Control, TLC compliant
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-31
Updated: 2017-12-31
Packaged: 2019-02-25 22:42:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,962
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13222752
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deliverusfromsburb/pseuds/deliverusfromsburb
Summary: tuesjade prompt: suit





	Crazy Quilt

“Well, this is it,” you say, leading Jade into your room. “The whole closet of a pampered former heiress. It’s all yours.”

Jade takes it in. Considering her mission, maybe you should have color coded everything first, but that would be more effort than you really want to expend. “You own so many clothes!”

Do you? Considering most of your friends’ situations, you’ve never had a good standard for comparison. “Oh, I don’t know. I don’t think I’m that far past the average hoard for a girl of my station. You have to look your best, especially if you have paparazzi and assassins after you in equal numbers. Imagine the shame for the whole company if I was taken out wearing something tacky.”

“I guess I wouldn’t know… I had to make things last, myself.” She laughs. “Before we got alchemization tech, almost everything I owned had patches.”

“Then you should be good at quilting, shouldn’t you?” That’s what has brought you here. Jade and Kanaya have decided they want to stitch together a quilt. It’s a project your older self is all in favor of - that kind of arts and crafts does strike you as grandmotherly. The sketches they’ve put together look nice, you have to admit, and now they’re hunting for fabric. Some of your old clothes don’t fit anymore, and so you’ve volunteered to let Jade look through your closet for anything you don’t mind her tearing apart.

Now, you lean in and start pushing your way through outfits you haven’t looked at since before SBURB. You have a selection of everyday wear and a whole section of formal apparel. As the heiress to Crockercorp, you had to make appearances. Your father read guides on dressing for tv and bought you a whole host of simple pastels, although that didn’t stop tabloids from commenting on your weight or your hair on the days you wore it natural. You told him you didn’t mind and sent the articles to Roxy to make fun of or Dirk to apply critical media theory to until they didn’t sting. The worst offenders in here were for really fancy occasions - the atrocious puffy nightmare you had to wear to the cupcake ball, or the form-fitting near-leotard “Betty Crocker” sent you and insisted you wear. Alternian Heiress fashion, you recognize it as now. “You can definitely use this,” you say, pulling that off the rail. There’s a flash of bright color from behind it, and you freeze. 

Jade waits, hand outstretched, until it’s clear you won’t move to give her the outfit. “Are you ok?”

“What? Oh, yes. Sorry. Something took me by surprise.” You hand the leotard over and reach back into the closet. Don’t be silly, Jane. It won’t bite. “Look at this old rag. What a laugh.”

“I don’t know, it’s kind of nice.” Jade takes this new offering - a suit, tailored to your measurements for once - and rubs the fabric between her fingers. “It’s made of good material. A lot of modern clothes feel so disposable.”

“It’s the color I’m not too keen on.” You take it back when she offers it, even though you’d rather not touch it.

“It’s very red.”

“I hadn’t even realized how much I had in that shade. Branding and all, I suppose, even if the color’s frowned upon on television. It… bleeds.” That statement sounds much more ominous now. You toss the suit onto your bed and start pulling everything else Crocker-red into your arms. “Take it all.”

Jade watches your increasingly speedy attempts to rip down offending outfits, eyebrows rising. “I’m not sure the quilt needs this much of one color.”

“You can make another one, then. I mean, how many people can you really fit under a single quilt? That’s poor planning for a household our size.”

“It was meant to be decorative.” She lifts a few shirts off the growing pile in your arms, which you appreciate. Your elbows were starting to buckle. “Are you sure you want to be this indiscriminate?”

“Red is no longer welcome in my wardrobe.” Jake still flinches when you surprise him coming into a room or if you raise your voice. If you actually wore the colors of your corrupted God Tier again, he’d probably faint dead away. You don’t want to associate yourself with that episode. It’s bad enough knowing the Empress only had to uncover what was already there. 

“Oh.” Her ears go back. “Because of…”

“Yes, because of. Meaningful pause and all. Isn’t it handy that we have that shared vocabulary?”

You’d shared a lot more than that. After you apprehended Jake and Roxy, you had both reported to the Empress's throne room. Her control was still taking hold then in fits and starts, while you floundered for some sort of purchase like a child who’d wandered into the deep end. You felt wires extending under your skin like tree roots breaking the sidewalk outside your house up into uneven concrete slabs. It was a sharp, squirmy sensation that made you want to scratch, but you didn't move. Beside you, a growl ripped out from between Jade’s teeth. She hadn't said anything. You didn't know if she could.

“My girls,” the Empress had said, but she'd stretched it out, _guuurls_. “Back where you belong.”

I do _not_ belong here, you wanted to say. You belonged with Jake and Roxy in prison, or Dirk wherever in space Jade had sent him. With your _friends_. Anywhere but with your so-called grandmother. The protest stayed locked in the back of your mind as she kept talking.

“You're both tough,” the Empress said. Her long hair billowed around her like an oil slick gushing out of a ruptured tanker. “Seen you put on some good shows in otha lives. You're wasted on this bunch.” She’d leaned forward and grinned. “I'm helping you level up.”

After God Tiering, you hadn’t felt much different, and when the nightmarish Jack appeared, you hadn’t known what to do. Now, you felt powerful. You felt confident. Except for the part of you, quieter by the moment, protesting, _No. This is wrong._ Wasn’t your outfit supposed to be pale brown instead of fresh-blood red? And your eyes, god, how had she done that to your eyes…

“You can't wait around for the world to turn out the way you want it,” the Empress told you. “You can’t let people walk all over you while you’re their dutiful little handmaid. No more putzing around waiting for orders. No more groveling for my old boss. We're winning and leaving this shithole, got it?  From now on, I'm taking what I want.” She stabbed the tines of her trident into the floor with a shriek of metal on stone. “And I'm starting with you.”

And she had.

The worst part was, you couldn't tell how much was her. Her words spoke to frustration you’d been keeping in for months or longer. What was the point of being an heiress always cooped up and denied things? Dirk took the leader's role and Jake from you and discarded both when he no longer felt they were worth his time. Roxy treated everything like a joke but was named the real hero for showing up. Jake was a dolt who couldn’t read a room with subtitles. And you, shoved aside, discounted, always fourth place out of four. Why not be powerful for once, and not be ignored? You’d looked at Jade’s fingers lengthening into claws and known you weren’t the only one who’d been choking the darkness down. Just as you know now.

You dump what you’ve collected onto your bed and sink down next to it. “I’m sorry. I didn’t intend to dredge this all up again today.”

She settles down on the other side of the pile and lets out a breath, slow and steady. Maybe she just hides it better, but Jade doesn’t seem to carry the same guilt you do. She killed someone. Oh, sure, you held the weapon, but it was on her orders. You know it, she knows it, and Karkat knows it too, which is nice, since it means he doesn’t get jumpy when you’re around. Maybe you shouldn’t, but you wish that was the worst you had done. At this point, death is more of a slap on the wrist than anything else. What you did to Jake… even if you never followed through on any of your threats, they hang over both your heads, and you can never fully take them back. They feel worse than killing. 

“The company sent me that suit for the rebranding event,” you say. You don’t want Jade to decide the silence needs to be filled with “talking about it” or something else equally painful. “I was supposed to make an appearance, say a few words to commemorate the moment. A week or so in advance they told me there’d been a change of plans and they wouldn’t be needing me after all. It was all a farce, of course. She must have already known I’d be entering the game and waltzing right into her clutches.”

“It must have been exciting being on tv,” Jade says. You almost laugh at the banality. Maybe that’s her intention. 

“Terrifying, at first. After a few times, though, it gets tiresome. I’d always have reporters breathing down my neck ready to leap on the slightest gaffe. I tried to stick to the script and not do anything silly, but then in their reports I was terse or surly.” There is no way to be acceptable in the public eye. Someone will always find fault with you. “Dirk and Roxy said I became quite the controversial historical figure after I disappeared. That worried them until they worked out I’d vanished because of the game, but of course no one else knew that. Some people thought the Empress had taken me out to avoid competition, or because I’d tried to stop her when she conquered the human race, and I became a martyr for the cause. Other people thought I would’ve been more of the same, and some rebel had gotten off a lucky shot. Good riddance, thinning out the herd of despots.” You sigh and kick your foot against the edge of your bed. “I wonder which one of them would have been right.”

“Maybe you would’ve taken the third option and defeated her,” Jade suggests. “Like you did in real life.”

“Maybe. But I was so resistant to the idea that something was wrong with my cozy, privileged life and the company I stood to inherit. It’s like the story of the frog in the pot of water. Would I notice it was getting too hot?”

“You would have.” She reaches over the pile of clothes and pats your hand, which you’ve been pinwheeling frenetically through the air. “Remember, what we did, it was us, but it was her too. We were keeping it in, because we knew it was wrong.”

“I suppose.” You breathe out and try to mimic the way she did it, long and slow. “The guilt comes and goes. I’ll be alright.”

She tugs the suit out from underneath the pile. “This is pretty nice. And the color’s not too bad. Do you think maybe you shouldn’t let her ruin it for you?”

You shake your head. “Even if I didn’t mind, I’m not going to do that to Jake, or anyone else who might not want to be reminded of my little moment. Besides, red was never my color. It was always hers.” You fold her hands over the suit. “Like I said, take it. Cut this up. Make red into something beautiful again.”

“Ok,” she promises. “We’ll make something good out of it.”


End file.
